Iron Curtain (2 page)

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AMONG MANY OTHER things, the year 1945 marked one of the most extraordinary population movements in European history. All across the continent, hundreds of thousands of people were returning from Soviet exile, from forced labor in Germany, from concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps, from hiding places and refuges of all kinds. The roads, footpaths, tracks, and trains were crammed full of ragged, hungry, dirty people.

The scenes in the railway stations were particularly horrific to behold. Starving mothers, sick children, and sometimes entire families camped on filthy cement floors for days on end, waiting for the next available train.
Epidemics and starvation threatened to engulf them. But in the city of Łódź, in central Poland, a group of women determined to prevent further tragedy. Led by former members of the Liga Kobiet, the Polish Women’s League, a charitable and patriotic organization founded in 1913, the women got to work. At the Łódź train station, Women’s League activists set up a shelter for women and children, supplying them with hot food, medicine, and blankets, as well as volunteers and nurses.

In the spring of 1945, the motives of these women were the same as they would have been in 1925 or 1935. They were witnesses to a social emergency. They organized themselves in order to help. No one asked them, ordered them, or paid them to do so. Janina Suska-Janakowska, in her late eighties when I met her, told me that she remembered these early efforts in Łódź as completely apolitical: “No one received money for charitable work … everyone who had a free minute helped.”
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Beyond aiding desperate travelers, the Łódź Women’s League, in its initial incarnation, had no political agenda.

Five years passed. By 1950, the Polish Women’s League had become something very different. It had a Warsaw headquarters. It had a centralized, national governing body, which could and did dissolve local branches that failed to follow orders. It had a general secretary, Izolda Kowalska-Kiryluk, who described the league’s primary tasks not in charitable, patriotic terms but by using political, ideological language: “We must deepen our organizational work and mobilize a broad group of active women, educating and shaping them into conscious social activists. Every day we must raise the level of women’s social consciousness and join the grand assignment of the social reconstruction of People’s Poland into Socialist Poland.”

The Women’s League also held national congresses, like the one in 1951 where Zofia Wasilkowska, then the organization’s vice president, openly laid out a political agenda: “The League’s main, statutory form of activism is educational, enlightening work … increasing women’s consciousness to an incomparably higher level and mobilizing women to the most complete realization of the goals of the Six-Year Plan.”
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By 1950, in other words, the Polish Women’s League had effectively become the women’s section of the Polish communist party. In this capacity, the league encouraged women to follow the
party’s line in matters of politics and international relations. It encouraged women to march in May Day parades and to sign petitions denouncing Western imperialism. It employed teams of agitators, who attended courses and learned how to spread the party’s message further. Anyone who objected to any of this—anyone who refused, for example, to march in the May Day parades or attend the celebrations for Stalin’s birthday—could be kicked out of the Women’s League, and some were. Others resigned. Those who remained were no longer volunteers but bureaucrats, working in the service of the state and the communist party.

Five years had passed. In those five years, the Polish Women’s League and countless organizations like it had undergone a total transformation. What had happened? Who had caused the changes? Why did anyone go along with them? The answers to those questions are the subject of this book.

Although it has been most often used to describe Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, the word “totalitarian”—
totalitarismo
—was first used in the context of Italian fascism. Invented by one of his critics, the term was adopted with enthusiasm by Benito Mussolini, and in one of his speeches he offered what is still the best definition of the term: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
³
Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought. Mussolini and his favorite philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, once wrote of a “conception of the State” that is “all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.”
⁴

From Italian, the word “totalitarianism” spread into all the languages of Europe and the world. After Mussolini’s demise the concept had few open advocates, however, and the word eventually came to be defined by its critics, many of whom number among the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.
⁵
Friedrich Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom
is a philosophical response to the challenge of totalitarianism, as is Karl Popper’s
The Open Society and Its Enemies
. George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four
is a dystopian vision of a world entirely dominated by totalitarian regimes.

Probably the greatest student of totalitarian politics was Hannah Arendt, who defined totalitarianism in her 1949 book,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
, as a “novel form of government” made possible by the onset of modernity. The destruction of traditional societies and ways of life had,
she argued, created the conditions for the evolution of the “totalitarian personality,” men and women whose identities were entirely dependent on the state. Famously, Arendt argued that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both totalitarian regimes, and as such were more similar than different.
⁶
Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski pushed that argument further in
Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy
, published in 1956, and also sought a more operational definition. Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information, and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only totalitarian states. Others—Mao’s China, for example—qualified too.
⁷

But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, “totalitarianism” was more than just a theoretical concept. During the early years of the Cold War, the term acquired concrete political associations as well. In a pivotal speech in 1947, President Harry Truman declared that Americans must be “willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes.”
⁸
This idea became known as the “Truman Doctrine.” President Dwight Eisenhower also used the term during his 1952 presidential campaign, when he declared his intention to go to Korea and bring an end to the war there: “I know something of this totalitarian mind. Through the years of World War II, I carried a heavy burden of decision in the free world’s crusade against the tyranny then threatening us all.”
⁹

Because American Cold Warriors openly positioned themselves as opponents of totalitarianism, Cold War skeptics naturally began to question the term and to ask what it meant. Was totalitarianism a real threat or was it merely an exaggeration, a bogeyman, an invention of Senator Joseph McCarthy? Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, revisionist historians of the USSR argued that even Stalin’s Soviet Union had never really been totalitarian at all. They claimed that not all decisions in the Soviet Union were really taken in Moscow; that local police were just as likely to initiate terror as those at the top of the hierarchy; that central planners were not always successful in their attempts to control the economy; that mass terror had created “opportunities” for many in society.
¹⁰
Among some, the term “totalitarian” came to be seen as crude, imprecise, and overly ideological.

In fact, many of the “orthodox” theorists of totalitarianism had made a
number of the same points. Few had claimed that totalitarianism worked. On the contrary, “because totalitarian rule strives for the impossible and wants to place at its disposal the personality of man and destiny, it can be realized only in a fragmentary manner,” wrote Friedrich. “This is precisely why the consequences of the totalitarian claim to power are so dangerous and oppressive, because they are so hazy, so incalculable, and so difficult to demonstrate … This contortion follows from the unfulfillable aspiration to power: it characterizes life under such a regime and makes it exceedingly difficult for all outsiders to grasp.”
¹¹

Political theorists in more recent years have taken this revisionist argument further. Some have argued that the term “totalitarian” is truly useful only in theory, as a negative template against which liberal democrats can define themselves.
¹²
Others find the word altogether meaningless, explaining that it has become a term that means nothing more than “the theoretical antithesis of Western society,” or else simply “people we don’t like.” A more sinister interpretation holds that the word “totalitarianism” is self-serving: we use it only in order to enhance the legitimacy of Western democracy.
¹³

In popular speech, the word “totalitarian” isn’t so much self-serving as overused. Democratically elected politicians are described as totalitarian (e.g., “Rick Santorum’s Totalitarian Instincts”), as are governments or even companies (one can read of “The United States’ march towards totalitarianism” or learn that Apple has a “totalitarian approach to its app store”).
¹⁴
Libertarians, from Ayn Rand onward, have used the word to describe progressive liberals. Progressive liberals (and indeed conservatives) have used the word to describe Ayn Rand.
¹⁵
The word is nowadays applied to so many people and institutions that it can sometimes seem meaningless.

Yet although the very idea of “total control” may now seem ludicrous, ridiculous, exaggerated, or silly, and although the word itself may have lost its capacity to shock, it is important to remember that “totalitarianism” is more than an ill-defined insult. Historically, there were regimes that aspired to total control. If we are to understand them—if we are to understand the history of the twentieth century—we need to understand how totalitarianism worked, both in theory and in practice. Nor is the notion of total control completely old-fashioned. The North Korean regime, set up along Stalin’s lines, has changed little in seventy years. Though new technology now seems to make the notion of total control harder to aim for, let alone achieve, we can’t be certain that mobile phones, the Internet, and satellite photographs
won’t eventually become tools of control in the hands of regimes that also aspire to be “all-embracing.”
¹⁶
“Totalitarianism” remains a useful and necessary empirical description. It is long overdue for a revival.

One regime in particular understood the methods and techniques of totalitarian control so well that it successfully exported them: following the end of the Second World War and the Red Army’s march to Berlin, the leadership of the Soviet Union did try very hard to impose a totalitarian system of government on the very different European countries they then occupied, just as they had already tried to impose a totalitarian system on the many different regions of the USSR itself. Their efforts were in lethal earnest. Stalin, his military officers and his secret policemen—known from 1934 to 1946 as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Komisssariat Vnutrenikh Del, or NKVD) and only later as the KGB—and his local allies were not trying to make a point about Ayn Rand or progressive liberals when they created the totalitarian states of Eastern Europe. To paraphrase Mussolini, they wanted very much to create societies where everything was within the state, nothing was outside the state, and nothing was against the state—and they wanted to do it quickly.